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Voting Rights Are Too Important to Leave to the States

Voting Rights Are Too Important to Leave to the States

Adam Cohen
// Published May 2, 2008
in
The New York Times

It would be hard for Florida to surpass
its disastrous performance in the 2000 election, but give the Sunshine
State credit for trying. Its latest assault on democracy: a law
threatening volunteer groups with crippling fines if they make small
mistakes in registering voters. The law seems clearly aimed at keeping
new voters — especially minorities and the poor — off the rolls. And it
is working. The League of Women Voters, which has registered Florida
voters since 1939, has called off its registration drive this year.

Florida is not the only state trying to stop eligible people from
voting. Georgia passed a law in 2005 that made voters pay for their
voter ID cards — a modern poll tax. The fee was eventually removed, but
the law could still block as many as 300,000 registered voters without
the right ID from casting ballots. In 2004, Ohio ordered counties to
throw out voter registration forms that were not on thick enough paper.

It is chilling to think that state legislators and election
officials would intentionally try to make it harder for Americans to
vote, but they always have — with poll taxes, literacy tests and
gerrymandering. There was a time when the Supreme Court regularly
struck these restrictions down. In 1966, it held Virginia’s $1.50 poll
tax unconstitutional. In 1972, it ruled that Tennessee’s one-year
residency requirement for voting violated the Constitution.

Now the Supreme Court has switched sides. This week, it upheld a
harsh Indiana voter ID law that could disenfranchise many poor, elderly
and student voters. The ruling will make it even easier for other
states to block voters’ access to the ballot box.

If the courts won’t protect voters, Congress has to. The
Constitution, in Article 1, Section 4, gives Congress broad authority
to set the rules for federal elections. It should use this power to set
minimum voting rights standards that would apply nationwide and ensure
that all eligible Americans could vote.

Voter registration rules are the place to start. Federal law should
hold organizations like the League of Women Voters harmless if they
make good-faith mistakes while registering people. There should be a
federal voter registration form, usable in any state, and uniform
regulations so Ohio could not throw out forms based on paper thickness
and Florida could not bar voters, as it now does, from fixing small
errors on a form within a month of an election.

Congress should also regulate voter challenges at the polls. Parties
and candidates often use bad-faith challenges as a dirty trick — to
intimidate voters or to slow down voting in certain neighborhoods.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, has a good bill
that would require challengers who are not election officials to sign
an affidavit stating why they believe a specific voter is not eligible.

Ballot formats should be standardized nationally rather than left to
the often bad judgment of local officials. Palm Beach County’s
butterfly ballot, which apparently changed the outcome of the 2000
presidential election, got a lot of attention, but there are confusing
ballots in use across the country.

The patchwork of state ID laws should be replaced by a single
standard that allows people to present any of an array of
identification, including college IDs, and permits voters to sign an
affidavit if they do not have ID.

There are many other problems that need to be fixed. Some states’
rules for provisional ballots — used when election officials cannot
find a voter’s name on the rolls — are clearly designed to disqualify a
large number of ballots from eligible voters.

Congress also needs to set a minimum standard for the number of
voting machines per voter and ensure that states allocate them
equitably. There were widespread reports in Ohio in 2004 of voters in
poor, black neighborhoods waiting hours to vote while white
neighborhoods had no lines. At Kenyon College, students waited up to 10
hours.

Good reform bills have been introduced in Congress, including ones
backed by Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. But they
have faced strong partisan opposition, and lobbying from influential
state and local election officials. Critics of reform make the specious
argument that states have the right to set the rules for federal
elections. The founders, when they wrote the Constitution, said
otherwise.